Catalyst 10.6 and GeForce 257.21 performance analysis

by · June 22, 2010

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12 Responses

  1. tviceman says:
    June 22, 2010 at 4:06 pm

    Thanks for the benchmarks apoppin! It’s nice to see side by side comparisons between drivers versions.

  2. Malz says:
    June 23, 2010 at 12:37 am

    Thanks for yet another driver review. I think I’ll wait for 10.7 :)
    I do miss the “%-Changed” to the right of the scores and an overall percentage gain or loss however, like you did in the 197.13 Driver-review. But this is still great, keep it up! :)

  3. John says:
    June 23, 2010 at 6:58 am

    Nice review!

    I’m curious though, why was such a high level of aa used on Crysis for the GTX 480? At 26fps, 8xq is not a realistic and playable amount of aa. No aa or 4x would be more appropriate I think.

  4. apoppin says:
    June 23, 2010 at 1:17 pm

    Thank-you. The percentage of change might get added back in future driver reviews.

    The reason that such a high level of AA was used on Crysis for the GTX 480 is that these results are being used in another review where most of the testing is at 8xAA or higher. Realistically, when I play Crysis at 2560×1600, I use 2xAA and lower some of the settings.

    For a overall driver review, I prefer to set the bar very high and use similar (maxed out) settings. The purpose is to find the change from one driver revision to the latest.

  5. yoga says:
    June 24, 2010 at 4:34 pm

    he, why no article in ABT has BFBC2 bench, i mean c’mon, that’s all guys’ favourite today. and also empire: tw/ napoleon: tw, too.
    one more question please, is there any difference forcing AA from ati Catalyst driver vs in-game AA? which one that you use? what about the general image quality? do they differ? THANX

  6. apoppin says:
    June 24, 2010 at 5:34 pm

    I haven’t even got BFBC2 yet. As I am SP only, it is not high on my priority list. It also takes me awhile to add a game to my benching suite. I need to play it first and relate the benchmark to actual performance in gameplay. Metro 2033 is my next scheduled game for adding to my suite. Perhaps Leon will do some BFBC2 benchmarks for us.

    Applying AA depends on the specific game; with most games there is no difference where it is applied – from the vendor’s CP or in-game. With some games – and specifically with Batman AA – Anti-aliasing is optimized for NVIDIA drivers in the game and can be set in the game’s control panel. However, with ATI drivers, you must force AA with CCC and it takes a bigger performance hit because it must now use a brute-force approach.

    Set AA in game if possible first; if there is no option for it, then set it in your vendor’s CP.

  7. luian90 says:
    June 25, 2010 at 7:23 am

    Hello, am extremely interested in becoming a tech reviewer, problem is, i dont know how!!!! If you would please lead me in the right direction, maybe i can review producs for your website. Thank you~ luis campos

  8. BFG10K says:
    June 27, 2010 at 4:25 am

    It looks like Call of Duty 4’s performance is still hosed.

  9. JumpingHubert says:
    July 10, 2010 at 6:40 pm

    Hi,
    why there is no nvidia result in Arma2?

  10. apoppin says:
    July 10, 2010 at 11:42 pm

    I have been using the ARMA2 demo and the results have been unreliable for this set of drivers. This game is such a difficult game on PC HW resources that I am dropping it altogether from my benching suite.

  11. Lonyo says:
    July 17, 2010 at 5:24 pm

    Would it be possible to do minimum FPS numbers in future comparisons?
    There was one site ([H] possibly) which did a pre-release vs 9.12 vs 10.3 or so, and the minimum fps showed a large improvement over time.

    It would be interesting to see minimum FPS changes as well as just average changes with new driver releases.

  12. apoppin says:
    July 17, 2010 at 8:41 pm

    I actually do have the minimums and maximums and they mostly show no improvement over the averages; it is proportional in most cases.

    The purpose of doing these comparisons is to get a quick idea of the driver changes in about 20 games before the drivers get old. If these charts were to be expanded, it would take much longer for them to be published.

    However, there is a *series* of articles that I am working on right now – these will show the minimums and maximums as well as the averages and they will span from Catalyst 10-5 through 10-7 and we can compare to GeForce 197.75, 257.21 and also the next set.

    You will be able to see for yourself beginning next weekend with a review of PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+ in Part One as we attempt to find the limits of HD 5870 architecture; and we continue right on through analysis of the Dragon Platform and explore the number of CPU cores and scaling on game performance. GTX 480, HD 5870 and HD 5870 CF will be featured and the minimums and maximums will be mostly shown in the graphs.

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